Was there really an Adventureland?
Yep. It’s on Long Island, and I worked there during college. We didn’t shoot the movie there, though, because we went back now to scout it out, and it just didn’t look right for the ’80s. It didn’t have the right sort of lovely seediness, the sense that at any moment you might trip over someone’s discarded needles. Are the details in the film drawn directly from your Adventureland experience? I took some artistic license, and pulled things from different periods of my young life. As we were taking the project to studios, many wanted me to make it contemporary, but I thought that was precisely what made it funny to dredge up all these specific old memories, and to recreate them. I love that it’s set in a different time period, when James would take this all way too seriously, shocked that all these games are rigged at the amusement park. And I love that this college boy starts thinking it through, about how much money they could possibly have lost if people could have actually won. How
